


Oh, Jim

by HarveyWallbanger



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Disturbing Themes, Dubious Consent, M/M, terrible people doing terrible things, violent imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-18
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2019-04-24 20:01:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14362584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarveyWallbanger/pseuds/HarveyWallbanger
Summary: And when you’re filled up to here with hate, don’t you know you’ve got to get it straight.





	Oh, Jim

**Author's Note:**

> Because of the element of violence and Jeremiah's state of mind, there are serious issues of consent in this story. If you think that this may upset you, please don't read it.  
> The title of this story and the quote in the summary come from the Lou Reed song, Oh, Jim.  
> This is a re-imagining of the climactic scene in Jeremiah's maze in the episode, "Mandatory Brunch Meeting".  
> I am not involved in the production of Gotham, and this school is not involved in the production of Gotham. No one pays me to do this. This story and the work it's based on are fiction. Do not try any of this at home. Thank you, and good night.

It doesn’t occur to Jeremiah not to run. Jerome’s hand is tight around his wrist, and Jerome has a gun, but later, it’ll seem so stupid. He could have stopped it all. Tripped Jerome. Thrown himself on the floor of the maze, forced Jerome to continue without him. The fear of a moment ago recedes, though, with motion, and Jeremiah forgets where he is. He thinks he’s- no, he’ll correct himself bitterly, he remembers. He remembers running with Jerome from another foolhardy adventure, another prank or game that neither could remember having thought up, himself. It had to have been Jerome. Things like that didn’t appeal to Jeremiah. They didn’t. They just didn’t. It was just so easy to sink into whatever Jerome- it was always Jerome- planned. It was easy to sink into sameness, be indistinguishable- and who could ever say whether they’d seen one small, redheaded shape running from the scene of the mischief, or two? It had to have been one, when Jeremiah had been tucked away in his room the whole time, reading. If no one knew that he’d been there, it was because you didn’t have to check on him. He was so quiet, so good. You lost track of a kid like that. Not like Jerome, who announced his presence like his own herald.   
“You’re like the good guy no one knows is really bad,” Jerome once told him, as they walked out of a matinee.   
“Are you the bad guy no one knows is really good?” Jeremiah asked.  
Jerome looked up, craned his neck back toward the marquee. SPECTER AND THE MUMMY MAN. “Yeah!” he said, his face lighting up.  
Out of the labyrinth.  
The others, the cops and freaks, fall away like parts shed by a crumbling motor, cracking to pieces as it continues to run. As the smoke pours out of it, its components fly loose, its life is just a formality. In the moment before utter destruction, a thing is most itself. Jeremiah learned to build by breaking. Now, it’s just him and Jerome, outside, in the night, and it’s worse. Worse than looking into Ecco’s eyes and seeing absolutely nothing. Worse than having the detectives pull their guns on him. Worse than having them think that he was Jerome. Worse, still, than encountering all three of them, Jerome, and the guy who looked like a magician, and the shape wrapped in rags, as ageless and genderless as a mummy. Even they were a gruesome form of company. Even they formed some kind of defense against Jerome. They could hurt Jeremiah, but they were still outside of it. They were part of the world- some other world than this. The world narrows now to just him and Jerome. It’s impossible, but Jeremiah swears that he can smell sawdust, animal manure, greasepaint, Lilah’s tequila.  
Jerome spins him like they were waltzing, throws him against a tree. Jeremiah can’t fight. He wouldn’t know how. He could… try to get the gun away. It’s too much like fighting. He could run. If it were daytime, he could find his way out of the forest, but at night, it’s like being behind your own eyelids, smooth and featureless darkness. A great eye with shivering lashes closing around you, shutting out light. Jeremiah feels himself breathing heavily. Automatically, he looks around.  
“Oh, don’t worry,” Jerome says, “No one’s going to interrupt the family reunion.”  
His breath is shaking out of him, but he forces himself to stick out his chin and look directly at Jerome. “Just kill me,” he says.  
“You always were in such a hurry,” Jerome grouses, “No appreciation for life’s little pleasures. All that rushing, you’re going to rush yourself into an early grave.”  
“Just do it,” Jeremiah says. He’s aware that he’s begging. “Please,” he adds. Maybe Jerome likes begging. Maybe it’ll be quick. Maybe Jerome will make him beg so much that it’ll give the cops time to get away from the freaks, and Jeremiah will be saved. If he lives- if they save him- he’ll…  
He’ll save lives. He’ll go to work for the department of public health and safety. He’ll help build safe homes for the disadvantaged.  
He’ll find Ecco. He’ll make it up to her. If she’s dead, he’ll pay for her funeral, spend his life tracking down the magician and the mummy. He’ll kill them both. Untraceable poison. A hired hit. Something that only looks like an accident.  
He’ll donate everything he has to the police department. He’ll leave Gotham forever. He’ll live on a mountaintop, someplace cold and blue. No one will ever see his face again.  
He’ll kill Jerome.  
That’s what he’s going to do.  
“So polite,” Jerome says, that weird voice crackling. Jeremiah finds himself looking for the scar on Jerome’s neck. The death was in all the papers. Theo Galavan cut Jerome’s throat after Jerome attacked Bruce Wayne at a fundraiser. There’d been a time when Galavan’s people had reached out to Jeremiah. Galavan was making faint but persistent noises about redeveloping the Narrows. Many had tried, all had failed. Secretly, Jeremiah was relieved when Galavan focused his ambitions on politics, and the calls stopped. Suddenly, mysteriously, Galavan, too, was dead, and just as suddenly and mysteriously, he was seen alive months later, jumping around in a suit of armor and a cape. A writer friend of Ecco’s wrote an article for a local interest magazine about the family. It was a roaring piece, full of allegations of murder and mayhem, dirty money, a sordid history of mental instability and familial delusion. At the last minute, it was pulled, never went to press. Then, of course, Galavan was truly dead, blown up, which no one could adequately explain, on the grounds of Wayne Manor.  
What a strange story.  
If he lives, Jeremiah will write about the Valeskas. It isn’t so grand a story, but people love tragedy, they love to hear about the pain and grime of other peoples’ lives. They love anything that makes them feel better about themselves. Anything far from them. The further, the better.  
“Wow. They sure taught you good manners at that fancy school,” Jerome continues, voice creaking, “You learn what a fish fork looks like? I’ve always been curious, myself.”  
“Just do it,” Jeremiah whispers.  
“Why would I want to get it over with? A moment like this comes along once in a lifetime.”  
“The longer you keep me alive, the less control you have over the situation,” Jeremiah says.  
“Oh, you mean that if I don’t kill you now, there’s every chance that the coppers will come to the rescue, and pump me full of lead?”  
“Yes,” Jeremiah says, “That’s exactly what I mean. You have two choices if you want to get out this alive: kill me now, or just go.”  
For a moment, Jerome is silent; then, he throws his head back, as if he would laugh. “You know, I missed this. I missed our talks. No one ever just… understood things the way that you did. No one got me in the same way. We have so much in common.”  
Jeremiah sighs. “Yeah. Sure.”  
“I could just go. Maybe leave you with something to remember me by.”  
The knife catches the moonlight; it could be the moon, itself. A slash of silver that fell from the sky.  
“I could make us look more alike,” Jerome says, “Do you miss that? I miss it. I miss knowing that there was someone out there in the world who looked just like me.”  
“What happened to you?” Jeremiah finds himself asking. A strange, clenching bitterness sounds behind his ribs. It dissolves into the taste of the sea: salt with the bitterness.  
“Guy named Dwight,” Jerome spits, “Stupid name. Big ideas. He brought me back from the dead. I guess when I didn’t immediately jump off the slab and start ballroom dancing, he got impatient. He cut off my face, and wore it as a mask.”  
“Did you kill him?” Dimly, he’s aware of Jerome lowering the knife, but that doesn’t seem so important anymore.  
Jerome smiles. Though, he can’t not smile anymore. “It’s like you know me. Though, you can’t really blame a guy. It’s not like he stole my parking space.”  
Suddenly, Jeremiah wants nothing more than to touch the scars, the skin. He knows what scars feel like, but this many, this deep, would surely feel different. He thinks of the scar on Jerome’s knee, many years old, made by a fall onto broken glass in a vacant lot baseball diamond. It must still be there, if faded and flattened. Later, Jeremiah jabbed the point of a penknife into his own knee, in the same place. When Lilah saw the wound, Jeremiah had no choice but to tell her that Jerome had done it. It was too neat to be an accident, and for reasons he couldn’t identify, he knew that he couldn’t tell her that he’d done it to himself. She merely rolled her eyes on her way out the door, only turning back to shout into the house that no one had better make trouble while she was gone. Jerome hadn’t been angry. Jeremiah was the good guy who could be bad. Jerome was the bad guy who could be good. Jeremiah takes a deep breath, makes the air push all of that down. He grits his teeth to keep it from coming back up. He doesn’t want to, but he asks, “Does it hurt?”  
“Nah!” Jerome says, wrinkling his nose, shaking his head, “After getting my face rearranged so many times in my formative years, I hardly feel a thing anymore.”  
Before he realizes what he’s doing, Jeremiah reaches up. It must even surprise Jerome, because he almost starts away. They look at each other. Neither speaks. Jerome leans forward slightly as Jeremiah runs his fingers along the band of scar under his chin. It feels both soft and hard, like rubber. A monster mask. Maybe this is the mask. Maybe there never was a Jerome; just Jeremiah looking back at himself, the reflection increasingly warped. The bones beneath Jerome’s skin, though, must be the same as Jeremiah’s. As if to test this, Jeremiah moves his hand up, over jaw and cheekbone. The skin feels like high-quality leather, which gives the disconcerting sensation of touching something that could be alive, but you know no longer is. You pay a lot of money to feel that, the semblance of life. Its reflection, warped and shallow. When this is all over, maybe Jeremiah will have Jerome made into something.  
“Kiss me.”  
That’s what Jeremiah will do. A pair of gloves. Something he can carry with him. Something that there are two of.  
He must show every bit of the shock he feels, because Jerome laughs. It’s the real laugh, not the stage one.  
“Don’t be a square,” Jerome says, “It’s okay if the other guy looks just like you.”  
“You have a gun. Make me.”  
Rolling his eyes, Jerome presses the muzzle of the gun into Jeremiah’s cheek. “There. You like that? Kiss me.”  
He closes his eyes, rests his hand on the back of Jerome’s neck. Slowly, the pressure of the gun recedes, as the pressure of Jerome’s mouth fades in. A pulse of warm breath. Jeremiah thought that Jerome might be cold, or carry another marker of the grave, feel wrong, somehow. That this would be something to be endured, something unbearable. Oh, but it is unbearable. It’s soft and warm. A strangely innocent collection of sensations; automatic motions, seeking and responding. There’s nothing worse. There’s nothing worse than being irretrievably mired in the grotesque, the ghastly, the deathly, and realizing that you don’t want to go anywhere. That’s the danger in human adaptability: we can get used to anything. The potential for happiness blooms like cancer, and if you aren’t careful, if you aren’t absolutely disciplined in cutting it out, you’ll follow happiness to your doom. It will eat your dreams, as you watch it. You’ll wake up, and find that you haven’t moved at all, that you’ve grown up, and your entire life is gone.  
This is doom, though. For all the cutting that Jeremiah did, doom still found him, or he, it. He thinks helplessly of Greek plays, reading for English classes, and sneers to himself. How very unsubtle.  
He makes no complaint when Jerome shoves his head to the side, opens his collar, kisses his neck. This is surgery. He’s a body being operated on. He’s having something removed. Jerome is going to sever it with his teeth. But he’s held, almost cradled, in Jerome’s arms, Jerome kissing his mouth again, touching his face with the same curiosity that Jeremiah touched Jerome’s. Is he comparing Jeremiah’s bones to his own? Evaluating, measuring, imagining all the ways that they might still resemble each other, on the inside.  
Jerome untucks his shirt, and the spell is broken. Stricken, Jeremiah looks down. It’s too much.  
“Don’t do this, Jerome.”  
“What? This?” He undoes Jeremiah’s pants, slips his hand inside.  
“Jerome...”  
“Shh. I need to concentrate. It’s not so easy, doing it to someone else.”  
There isn’t anywhere safe to look, so Jeremiah closes his eyes. He tries to think of Ecco, but he just keeps picturing her dead. It’s easier to think of nothing, but that again brings him perilously close to enjoying it. He hears himself breathing, and feels a climbing current of dread. The blood is dragged through his body, stolen from his heart.  
“Tell me to stop,” Jerome says.  
Jeremiah laughs. “You’ll kill me.”  
“With what?” Jeremiah opens his eyes. “Oh, this?” Jerome says, and holds the gun up to his head. He pulls the trigger. There’s an irritated click. Jerome keeps doing it, the clicking like the sound of an insect in the forest. Disgusted, he looks at the gun, and tosses it into the night. He puts his hands on Jeremiah again. He looks into Jeremiah’s eyes. Somewhat sadly, Jeremiah thinks, he says it again: “Tell me to stop.”  
“It’s a trick,” Jeremiah says bitterly.  
“It’s not a trick.” Jerome sounds hurt. “I’m tired of playing,” he says gravely.  
Jeremiah says nothing. Breathing through his open mouth, trying not to lean into Jerome’s hands, he looks at Jerome and says nothing. Idly, Jeremiah thinks that he might be angry, but it’s so far from him. It’s the meaning of anger- like he’s just defined it for himself, but it’s not part of him. The night air is a cold blade on his skin. He feels flayed, cut open. Maybe that’s what happened to anger- to fear. Maybe the night cut it out of him. Maybe that’s what Jerome is cutting away.  
There’s still one thing left, though. Jeremiah may not want it, but it’s there.  
Jeremiah tries to pull Jerome toward him, but he’s pushed away.  
“You have to say it,” Jerome says, “You don’t get anything until you tell me.”  
If Jerome’s already said it, it’s easy. It’s already happened, so there’s no reason not to do it again. “Kiss me,” Jeremiah says.  
Jerome presses against him again, all of him, as they kiss. He wraps his arms around Jerome. You don’t really feel your own body, the way that another person would, but Jeremiah knows that he feels nothing like this. There’s a hardness in Jerome’s shoulders and back that Jeremiah doesn’t recognize in himself. Maybe he says something, and doesn’t realize it. Maybe Jerome just knows what he’s thinking. He mutters: “A touch of the old rigor mortis,” before he puts his hand down Jeremiah’s pants again.  
“I’m going to take you away,” Jerome says suddenly, incongruously, “I’m going to take you away from all of this.” It’s sinister, but it also sounds dreamy, wistful. It’s pleasurably discordant enough to make Jeremiah push into Jerome’s hand, the thought of being both threatened and issued a promise. Whatever it is, it’s real, and unstoppable, and it’s coming. For both of them. Jerome’s other hand is on his face, steering it back toward his. Jeremiah pulls him close and kisses him, one hand in his hair, the other pressing into his crotch.  
He directs Jerome, makes him do it harder, rougher. He’s ready for it to be over. He’s ready for whatever comes next. Whatever comes next, that’s what he wants. You get rough when you want something. He grips Jerome so hard that he cries out. He laughs. He moans, the sound beating against something in Jeremiah’s chest. Jeremiah comes.  
For a long time, they stay like that, two halves of a book closed in on each other. Jesus, that’s a stupid image. Jeremiah thinks he might be falling asleep. Then: “Well, it’s been fun.” Jerome kisses him softly on the mouth, and---- he’s gone! Jeremiah doesn’t have time to wonder, to think before the door to the maze opens, and guns drawn, coats flapping, the detectives rush into the dark. And drag Jeremiah, who is blinking dazedly and babbling pathetic explanations and struggling to cover himself, into the light.

The pathways in a maze are designed to confound; they offer false starts, dashed hopes of resolution, of safety. A labyrinth is seemingly a kinder thing. The pathways don’t veer off at random, suddenly terminate. One begins to trust it. When one walks in a labyrinth, one is being led, shepherded. Toward a foregone conclusion. One’s fate has already been determined. The pathways of a labyrinth don’t fly from each other. Coming from opposite directions, unwinding symmetrically, they meet at the center.


End file.
